Britain entering first world war was 'biggest error in modern history'

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/30/britain-first-world-war-biggest-error-niall-ferguson?CMP=share_btn_fb

What am I reading now:  I am currently rereading ( a textbook) "The History of Western Civilization - The Continuing Experiment" (14th Century to recent times) and, depending on my mood and location, concurrently rereading Barbara Tuchman's "The Distant Mirror", and have just just begun Niall Ferguson's fascinating "Civilization: The West and the Rest ", which I may now concentrate on because it is a library E Book and I only have two weeks to read it.

 After reading Margaret MacMillan's "The War That Ended Peace - The Road To 1914", and my ongoing work-time listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcasts on WWI , even with my confessedly limited knowledge of history, I came to the same conclusion about Britain's "biggest error in modern history". Ditto for Turkey's entry (caused by fear of Russia's encroachment on Ottoman territory) , which led to the post-colonial mess in the Middle East. Just posting this as a partial, personal antidote to last year's communal chest pounding about how heroically the propaganda driven cannon fodder boys of the British Empire (and more specifically Duncan, BC) marched off to defend King and Country from the scourge of the evil baby killing Huns (such as my grandfather).

 Why study history? A quote from Ferguson's intro to "Civilization ...": :'There is in fact no such thing as the future, singular; only futures, plural. There are multiple interpretations of history, to be sure, none definitive - but there is only one past. And although the past is over, for two reasons it is indispensable to our understanding of what we experience today and what lies ahead of us tomorrow and thereafter.First, the current world population makes up approximately 7 per cent of all the human beings who have ever lived. The dead outnumber the living, in other words, fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril. Second, the past is really our only reliable source of knowledge about the fleeting present ant to the multiple futures that lie before us, only one of which will actually happen. History is not just how we study the past; it is how we study time itself'.

Water, water everywhere ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/science/space/suddenly-it-seems-water-is-everywhere-in-solar-system.html?_r=0

First, I would like to confess that I have in my ancient times read Coleridge's long poem. I wonder if there is a celestial albatross for us to skewer with a thoroughly modern crossbow, so that, in a terminal fit of literary allusion, some hapless future space mariner , while dying of thirst due to a breakdown of the H2O recycling system, cannot help but hoarsely mutter "water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink . . .".

"Luck is probability taken personally"

https://www.facebook.com/theskepticsguide/photos/a.10150497216386605.426482.16599501604/10153129899066605/?type=1&theater

The drunkard's walk interferes with your fantasy of free will. You are the captain of your ship, but you have no control over other ships, icebergs, . . .or falling asteroids. Your "luck" will run out sooner or later, so you shouldn't take it personally, be it good, bad or whatever.

Sexist language?

After reading a German article in which they refer to Mayim Balik as a Schauspielerin (a male actor would be a Schauspieler). I thought I would comment on something that I have wondered about. Is it sexist to employ words with expressly different morphological gender - e.g., actor and actress ? That is, why have actresses become actors? Do you think this might not be a bit too feminist PC? I understand that this supposedly has something to do with gender equality and "actress" is seen by some to be sexist, or does not include transgenders. . "Actor" seems to be the ever-more accepted PC form used by media, but it seems misguided to me. What would be sexist is to consider an actress to be less whatever than an actor. I may be wrong, if we accept a STRONG interpretation of the Whorfian (Sapir-Whorf) Hypothesis - more or less the idea that the structure of language strongly influences our world view. This conundrum is more express in languages that do have grammatical gender, as traditional roles change. In Spanish, the "doctor -Dr."/"Doctora - Dra." distinction is now common usage, but there is resistance to "soldado/soldada" (male / female soldier). Will we go the Swedish route where last July their Språkrådet (Language Council) added gender neutral pronoun "han" to the Swedish word-list/glossary; and, though it has so far not been accepted by mainstream Swedish media and society as a whole, it is being used by some journalists. This would be equivalent to inventing a neutral pronoun to replace the "she/he, him/her, hers/his" distinction. What is your choice for a neutral pronoun? I saw Mary yesterday and it told me that its dog was sick. I spoke to John yesterday and it told me it had lost its job. ????